Who Gets to Tell Other People’s Stories?

In Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Anna Holmes and James Parker debate the line between empathy and exploitation.

By Anna Holmes

Empathy is about deepening connections. Exploitation, about filling one’s pockets.

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Anna HolmesCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Here’s how I see it: Empathy is the ability to respect and maybe even understand another’s point of view, revealing larger truths about ourselves and others. Exploitation is the use of another’s experience for personal gain. Empathy requires self-awareness. Exploitation is marked by self-interest. Empathy is about deepening connections. Exploitation, about filling one’s pockets, literal or figurative.

This isn’t to say that those who attempt or express empathy always succeed at it, even though they may be well meaning. There are times when such efforts can appear profoundly self-serving; when bearing witness or showing compassion feels more like public performance than real acknowledgment or understanding of another. (No surprise, but this happens a lot in politics.) I am reminded of a lyric from the first act of the Broadway hit “Hamilton,” when Aaron Burr, introducing the audience to the Schuylers — the three wealthy young women who will profoundly shape the narrative to come — complains, “There’s nothing rich folks love more / than going downtown and slummin’ it with the poor.” Later, addressing one of the sisters directly, he asks, “Why you slummin’ in the city in your fancy heels / You searchin’ for an urchin who can give you ideals?”

Sometimes empathy and exploitation find expression in the same space. In 2012, in an essay for newyorker.com about the HBO series “Girls,” I addressed public complaints concerning Lena Dunham’s decision to center her story on the experiences of four young white women. The issue, to me, was not so much that Dunham needed to apologize for the types of women she chose to focus on, but that the people of color who did appear on the show were played simplistically to type: An older black man was written as a mouthy homeless nuisance; a young Asian-American woman as a fiercely competitive goody two-shoes. It felt as if Dunham and the other writers were exploiting caricatures of people of color in order to accessorize the show’s complicated portrayals of 20-something Caucasians.

I am not of the opinion that Dunham and other artists cannot, or should not, attempt to tell the stories of people unlike themselves — and I am resistant to claims that, for instance, men are by definition unable to paint honest portrayals of women. (Or Koreans of Latinos, or African-­Americans of, say, the white Amish.) George Packer, in a recent essay for newyorker.com, expressed a similar concern, writing that such “radically limiting” assumptions lead one “down a dead-end street and into a sinkhole,” and argued for a robust, if uneasy, coexistence between the idea that identity is part of experience, and that experience (or the absence of such) should not preclude anyone from telling other people’s stories.

Which brings me back to “Hamilton.” It’s a provocative piece of art for any number of reasons, including its reversal of the sort of cultural appropriation we are accustomed to seeing in popular culture, by having performers of color enact the stories of white people. But even here, there are problems. In an interview in the online magazine Slate, the historian Lyra Monteiro argued that the musical blithely glosses over or ignores altogether the fact that America’s founding fathers were involved in slavery. “It’s still white history,” she said. “And no amount of casting people of color disguises the fact that they’re erasing people of color from the actual narrative.”

Perhaps, then, the line between empathy and exploitation is not so much an issue of identity but integrity, a commitment to reckoning with all sides of a story and meeting people where they are, not where we think they should be. In the end, of course, there’s really only so much we — as creators and consumers — can do about it, beyond remaining vigilant about our true motives and staying open to criticism. As George Washington in “Hamilton” sings in the finale: “You have no control: / Who lives, / Who dies, / Who tells your story.”

Anna Holmes is an award-winning writer who has contributed to numerous publications, including The Washington Post, Salon, Newsweek and The New Yorker online. She is the editor of two books: “Hell Hath No Fury: Women’s Letters From the End of the Affair”; and “The Book of Jezebel,” based on the popular women’s website she created in 2007. She is an editorial executive at First Look Media and lives in New York.

A friend of mine was frustrated with the book he was reading — a biography of somebody or other. The author seemed to dislike his subject, which for my friend constituted a form of professional misconduct, a beam in the biographer’s eye. “We’re not getting the full story,” he fretted. And then he dropped the big line: “A biography should only be written in the key of sympathy.”

Interestingly, ironically — or perhaps neither — this friend and I are no longer speaking. We ran out of sympathy, went off-key, something went wrong. But I’ve hung on to that line of his, because I think it expresses both a core value in human relationships and an important literary practice. Namely: If you don’t open your heart to somebody, feel the weight of his individuality, expose yourself to his predicament, how can you possibly hope to understand him? Sympathy, empathy, same thing. And “open your heart” is a cliché, I know, soulful-­mechanical jargon. But it means something, so let’s put it another way: Keep your flaps ajar, brother; lower your filters, sister; and you’ll get more data, more details, more stuff to write about.

What are the risks of openness, of unfilteredness — of a life of gaping flaps? Well, you can be deceived; you can be ripped off; you can be destroyed by bores; you can be overwhelmed. And you can get hurt. Sometimes you might have to get hurt. In this last respect I’ve always admired the violent postscript of Hunter S. Thompson’s “Hell’s Angels” — wherein the author, after a year of riding with the Angels and getting his story, is arbitrarily and with summary brutality “stomped” by some of his subjects. It’s nasty, but it’s apt, because it represents Thompson’s ritual extraction or expulsion from the milieu of his book: The immersion kick is over, the price is paid, and the writing can begin. Also: We’re all modern people, incarcerated in our subjectivity, and a genuine breakout experience of the Other — the person, the Hell’s Angel in front of us — comes to us via the grace of God alone. Which is to say, unpredictably and as a gift. Nonetheless it’s the only way to go, the only thing to aim for, especially if you’re writing that person’s story. Good novelists know all this by instinct. To the degree that you are using a person, a character, simply to propel your plot or give shape to your ideas, to that same degree you are denying this character his or her full reality — and your story will suffer accordingly. Where empathy stops, in other words, exploitation starts.

I was recently given a rather astonishing little book called “Stories From the Shadows,” by James J. O’Connell, M.D. “Dr. Jim,” as he’s known on the streets of Boston, where for 30 years he has been bringing medical treatment to the homeless, is a scrupulous clinician and a skillful writer, and his book takes the form — outwardly — of a sequence of case histories and clinical encounters. Patients are initially characterized by the physical or psychological symptoms they present — pulmonary tuberculosis, paranoid schizophrenia — and the various treatment options are explored. But then, as Dr. O’Connell digs into each patient’s medical history, and slowly illuminates his or her current circumstances, something else happens. A personality begins to emerge. A voice begins to be heard. And an interior — charged, spiritual, essential — begins to make itself known. It’s an extraordinarily instructive process. Here, one feels, is empathy, the real deal: not a rushed and sloppy embrace, or a sweaty effort to relate, but something alert, and expert, and observant, and profoundly respectful.

James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic and has written for Slate, The Boston Globe and Arthur magazine. He was a staff writer at The Boston Phoenix and in 2008 won a Deems Taylor Award for music criticism from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.